In recent years, highly functional mobile terminals—so called smartphones, which are provided with the telephone function and information processing function, have become common Since the smartphone is small and light, it has an advantage of mobility. The user, however, sometimes wants to use a larger screen than the smartphone when he or she watches a television program or a moving picture.
In this case, the smartphone might be connected to a personal computer—desktop type, note type, tablet type, or the like—or a television receiver that has a larger screen than the smartphone—and an image that is output from the smartphone might be displayed on the screen of the connected device.
A technique that allows information that is output from a mobile terminal to be displayed on a larger screen than the mobile terminal is described for example in Patent Literature 1. It describes that when the user is playing, for example, a game machine such as a slot machine and the mobile terminal of the user is receiving a telephone call, the machine notifies the user that the mobile terminal is receiving the telephone call and reply messages to the telephone call can be selected on the display of the machine by the user.
As described above, when the user connects the smartphone, for example, to a personal computer of tablet type—hereinafter referred to as a tablet device—and watches a television program, a moving picture, or the like on the screen of the tablet device, if the smartphone has been set for the silent mode, which may be also called the vibration mode, the smartphone will not output a sound signal and thereby the tablet device or the like will not output sound. In such a case, the user has to change the setting of the smartphone—has to cancel the silent mode of the smartphone—before or after he or she connects the smartphone to the tablet device or the like.
In addition, besides the screen size, the smartphone and the tablet device or the like may differ in their resolution. In this case, it is preferred that the size of an image displayed on the device—tablet device or the like—that is connected to the smartphone be set on the smartphone based on the screen size, screen resolution, and so forth of the connected device—tablet device or the like.
Some tablet devices have an interface mechanism that internally holds the smartphone such that the tablet devices can be connected the smartphone instead of the use of a cable or the like. In such an interface structure, the input section, such as touch panel, and the hardware resources, such as receiver, speaker, microphone, and various sensors, that are used for the telephone function of the smartphone cannot be used. Thus, after the tablet device and the smartphone are connected, it would become difficult to set the smartphone using the input section. In this case, before the tablet device and the smartphone are connected, the setting of the smartphone has to be changed. Alternatively, after they are connected, the setting of the smartphone has to be changed using the input section of the tablet device.
However, it may be difficult for the user to set the device that is connected to the smartphone for some values that are to be set such as screen size. Since the hardware resources —and the specifications—of the smartphone differ from those of other devices having larger screen sizes than the smartphone, it is difficult to imagine the specifications of various devices that can be connected the smartphone and decide the setting values of the smartphone based thereon. If the settings of the smartphone are changed on the tablet device or the like after they have been connected, since the user has to select the necessary setting items for the smartphone on the tablet device, input the necessary setting values to the tablet device, cause the tablet device to notify the smartphone of the changed setting values, and cause the smartphone to change its setting values, the setting operations that he or she has to perform would become bothersome.
Thus, if the user uses the smartphone together with a device having a larger screen than the smartphone, before he or she connects the devices, he or she would have had to change the settings of the smartphone which causes inconvenience. Even after the user has connected the smartphone and the device, he or she has to perform a bothersome operation—change the settings of the smartphone.